Category Archives: Vegetarian Issues

People don’t put little pieces of plastic into the sea deliberately, but it gets their anyway, and gets mixed up with the planktons and ending up in the food chain, reducing the photosynthesis of sea algae, etc, and they never biodegrade.Read the rest of this entry →

Some people swear by chicken broth as a cure-all. Certainly Jewish traditions make a lot of it, and from them also Polish cuisine makes a big deal out of rosol, as they call it. It is a useful pick-me-up while on a liquids only fast, and it is very useful to tide oneself over between meals as an alternative to tea or coffee.

For those eating chickens, the best chickens to use are older ones, like an old rooster who has served his days making hens happy and waking your neighbours up in the morning while you blithely sleep through it. He has tough meat and is unpalatable. His Chicken Kiev would be more of a Chicken Maydan, but boiled into broth he gives you more microelements than Mendeleyev himself wrote about in the song “On the road to Mendeleyev, where the flying fishes playev”.

The Mexican recipe for chicken soup is rumoured to start with the same four words as every recipe in the Mexican recipe book, accordingly to the old joke. If you don’t know what those four words are I will not ruin the tone here by mentioning them, but maybe someone will show their knowledge of the history of comedy by mentioning them in the comments section below. (Come on, I have to do something to encourage readership participation round here!)

This gives a calendar of mass animal dyings all over the world most of which were reported only in local media. This does give cause for pause. This also claims that avian flu is alive and well in Germany but the news in the neighbouring countries or even Germany itself are largely silent on the matter.

Like this:

This is a great film about it but is unfortunately in Polish, but it includes info about how Syngenta, one of the producers, had repressed its own research that it’s GM animal feed has killed 5 of its own cows, and therefore allowed a poisonous GMO to go into the market.

If you take the case of Soya, there are only a few producers of GM soya seeds and even though Ukraine’s non GM Annushka brand would do very well in Europe, the lobby is very strong to use the Monsanto brands and make Poland dependent on US NWO firms and now organic farmers cannot even buy the non-GM soya here, and need to buy from Belgium.

There are things being done by certain global firms, in the area of vaccinations, in the areas of food and certain other areas, by big corporations and governments in cahoots with them, to get control of our food chain. They are then able to hold populations to ransome either for economic gains or for political ones. Whether you think that there are already conspiracies for population reduction or not, why allow such companies to obtain the potential for such power?

Cancer is all about protein, in particular about things that can attack your DNA. I would say that it ought to be glaringly obvious that if things which are purely natural are capable at times of attacking our DNA as indeed they are, especially animal proteins rather than plant ones, but plants are also sometimes quite capable of it, even in their natural state, how much more something which has been tampered with by rude hands and which has lost its natural stability can mess about with our DNA.

Animation of the structure of a section of DNA. The bases lie horizontally between the two spiraling strands. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In not resisting GMO, we will wake up one day in a situation where those tampered genes are out of the box and can’t be reigned in again. That’s already the cases with various forms of plants and fishes in various parts of the world. The natural, God-given or evolution-given (whatever you prefer) form is now irreversibly inbred with the manmade form.

These big companies will then effectively own rights to whole species and will say that every salmon that swims on God’s earth is theirs in a similar way to the way Cat Steven’s record label behaves as if every performance of “Morning is broken” belongs to them and they need to be paid for it, even though it is an old English hymn and nobody got paid by them when they first took it and made use of it. They are trying to steal the world from under our noses, even words, thoughts, the water that rains down on us and the air we breathe are not free from commercial plundering by overgrown companies who can buy the legislation they require, and all at our expense.

It is a huge commercial raid on us and a huge blasphemy against this planet and its Creator.

It has been a few weeks not so much hectic as rather completely crzay, hence my kind and loyal readers might with reason consider themselves somewhat neglected by this blog. In order to put that right, I shall attempt a brief post on a useful topic which may be of help to many people.

Some years ago my dear friend Leslie Grufford informed me that you should not eat and drink at the same time. I was not convinced of this at the time as I knew that Mr Grufford was prone to making statements that I didn’t agree with, although with the passage of time some of them have increased their plausibility and this statement of his is no exception. Looking at the matter today I trawled the internet looking for opinions on whether you should avoid fluid intake close to mealtimes and if so why?

Of course I had an inkling myself of why this should be, and this was confirmed by those who said that the stomach contents are flushed into the lower reaches of the Alimentary Canal more quickly if you drink fluids, whereas it hangs around longer in the “pouch” as some commentators put it, if you don’t drink at the same time, which not only enables the feeling of fulltitude to happen with less food, but also better digestion of the nutrients in the food.

Which all kind of makes sense. The best reason to have liquids at hand is of course in case you find yourself choking, but hopefully that doesn’t happen very often and if anxiety to avoid choking makes you eat slower, then well, there’s a third advantage.

It is one thing to know the above though, and quite another to put it into practice. People like to have a drink with meals and there are some social kinds of eating which rather call for the drinking of fluids at the same time.

Maybe we need to change social morays and other sociable eels like the conga in order to reflect what actually is conducive to better health. Maybe we should wait for a good hour after desert before we start to drink coffee. In a lot of restaurants I’ve been at that tends to be what can happen anyway even whn you don’t want it to, so maybe that should be formalised and written into the newest editions of Debretts?

Aperitifs and wine with meals which are included in the price with certain set posh meals are a big temptation to let all that go by the board on occasion, but if that happens at least we need to get back on the programme when we are eating in normal life. It isn’t what happens on conferenced that determines if we are fat or thin, but what happens in our own kitchens and dining rooms and at our desks or canteens at work.

I will say this – an unexpected side effect I noticed when becoming vegetarian was that the desire to drink while eating automtically went down. I need to remember to drink after meals.

The recommendations people on line say that their doctors had given them is not drinkning from 15 minutes before eating a meal to 30 minutes or in some cases 60 minutes after finishing eating. Maybe 45 minutes is a good compromise. I like the 80:20 rule but I’m not sure it would apply here very well.

Many changes have been made to taxonomy since I was a schoolboy and had a basic grasp of what went in what kingdom, phylum, class, order, family and genus, but when I last checked, fish STILL weren’t vegetables.

I don’t want to get unduly Aristotelian, Linnean, Cladistic or othewise dogmatic about it, but I think it stands to reason that vegetables include many things, but rather not fish.

I understand that you can debate about whether a tomato is fruit or a vegetable. Or that a mushroom is a fungus rather than a vegetable, and also that nori is made of algae and green drinks from spirogyra so even these things are not really “vegetables” either, so one has to be a bit flexible with the definition of what is a vegetable when following a vegetarian diet. Basically, though, if something can move around at will, an individual going from place to place, it’s highly likely that it isn’t a vegetable. There are some corals which don’t get out much, and are still animals, but there aren’t really any vegetables which go walkies – not outside the novels of John Wyndham like the Triffids, anyhow.

So why, then, am I continually being offered things like tuna and herrings when I say that I am a vegetarian in Poland? Do people here genuinely believe that fish are vegetables? Do they think that tuna and herrings photosynthesise and put down roots or something? What’s up with these phoney fish vegetables people give offering me here?